Honestly, the whole concept of "recycling" plastic feels more like a PR strategy than an environmental solution. If it were genuinely effective, we’d see investment, innovation, and accountability—like we do with metals. Instead, we’re handed the guilt while corporations keep pumping out garbage.
this post was submitted on 02 May 2025
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Much like the concept of a carbon footprint, it exists solely to make consumers think they can make an individual difference so they won't push for regulations
Yeah I especially love that one everytime I fly. I get to choose the environmentally friendly option with lower carbon footprint for more money. Who the fuck they think they are kidding? We are all in the same plane burning fuel at 10000 m.
Its basically impossible to avoid too. Anything you buy comes packaged in plastic for the most part.
Dont forget the goal of disrupting actual leftist movements into confusion
Honestly if it was up to me I'd just ban plastic flat out unless you got some kind of "this is actually really important and NEEDS to be made of plastic" cert
There are tons of single-use plastic medical supplies - syringes, wrappers, etc.
Would you say that those things are actually really important and NEED to be made of plastic? I wonder if Aeri would account for that possibility
I'm not the ultimate authority on all things, but I'd question if these things need to be made of plastic.
Syringes are made out of things like Borosilicate glass, Stainless steel, autoclaves and cases exist.
It would also be way less big a deal if we just didn't have as much plastic in general.
Interesting to compare aluminium recycling with plastic recycling
When the true aim is to recycle material, industry comes to the party and you get a refund scheme, even purpose built deposit facilities that can be set up locally
When the aim is to misdirect public attention toward a non solution you get government mandated plastics recycling bins and penalties for "contamination" plus never ending messaging (gotta keep the lie alive with constant repetition lmaooo). Coercion is just a lowkey admission that the material isn't worth recycling
The real question isn't how to get the plastics industry to change, it's how to make the ruse no longer a tenable position for governments
The sad thing is, only types 1 & 2 plastics are recyclable in any real fashion, and sometimes not even then.
That means types 3 through 7 are better disposed of in the trash, where at least they’ll be sealed into a landfill instead of being shipped overseas to end up somewhere far less environmentally secure.
These types are the numbers inside the recycling symbol. Many things are mixed and matched - a plastic bottle might be a type 1 (recyclable), yet its screw-on cap is typically a type 5 (largely non-recyclable). Always try to find the recycling symbol and dispose of anything not a type 1 or 2 in the trash.
I noticed a bottle was recyclable but the label wasn’t, was annoyed that they would do that because I doubt there are many who would read the label to know that
But even recycled plastic just gets shipped to SEA for them to deal with instead of actually being recycled so I guess it doesn’t matter
#7 isn’t even a material, rather “other.”
PS (#6) and plastic films can be recycled at dedicated drop offs.
It depends. My municipality recycling bins take type 5.
I can absolutely guarantee that it is either
- Burned for power generation
- Disposed of in a landfill
- Exported to a foreign country
Only about 0.5-2% of all “recycled” polypropylene is actually recycled in North America, in places where it is accepted for recycling.
Being an old man this really gets me. I love the internet and the way computers today but there is a whole lot that worked fine before plastics were so common. Almost nothing in the grocery store had plastic and everything was pretty much as convenient as nowadays. Sure you had to pay a deposit on the glass bottles but you got it back when you returned them.
If I had to choose glass or plastic, I am always choosing glass. Glass is such a good material. It is infinitely recyclable, the bottles can be reused for several years, and if they are buried they don't release microplastics.
I jump for situations where the glass is taken back for wash and reuse. Its the most sensible thing. I swear I had heard about restaurants doing this with containers but I never actually encountered one. So they had perm togo containers they took back and washed.
That's what we have here in Czechia, it is called Rekrabička.
It depends on which aspects of the environmental impact you're looking at, as melting glass to recycle it can be much more damaging than landfilling several plastic bottles if the glass furnace is heated by fossil fuels. If glass bottles are washed and reused, they're much better than plastic, but that's rarely what happens.
The cleaning was common back then. Every store took back the tall glass bottles of soda and in modern times oberweiss brought that back with milk. The glass melting is nice just as a final option really.
Gas is used to heat up glass furnaces most of the time. But it is possible to use elctricity aswell, which is more and more sources from either solar or nuclear.
Not saying it is greener than plastic when it comes to electricity and shipping.
That's still the way it works in Denmark, but with plastic bottles too. Something like 98% of all bottles are recycled.
Treating waste water? Water treatment plants cost so much that they will never compete with dumping raw sewage into the river!
Which is why my local water treatment plant built a brand new pipe so they can dump directly into the river rather than the local nature reserve.
I'm so glad we privatised that...
The price stuff can change through taxation that makes new plastic more expensive than recycled plastic.
As we all know, taxation is super popular and has never been controversial, ever.
At the very least flaskepant has worked great for like a century here in Norway. Always kind of surprising when other countries don't have it.
The US still has subsidies going to petrochemical companies, despite being insanely profitable. Basically, just extracting the country's wealth in addition to natural resources. Ending those or forcing them to be spent on recycling would help here immensely.
Most plastic can’t be recycled into something usable. Plastic degrades quite a bit with each recycling, leaving a bunch of microplastics behind (same thing with “biodegradable” plastic). It would be better to tax it enough (or ban it) to make it not used in certain applications.
Should've made the producers responsible for collecting and processing all plastics they produce. It that makes certain products economically non viable, than that's on them to innovate better processes.
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Have we considered calling it a tariff instead of a tax? Tariffs on all new plastic. It might work.
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And this is how capitalism eats itself. Nothing can be done without a market incentive, including not suffocating our planet to death.
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Really annoyed to have believed in plastic recycling even into my thirties. Being an idiot is such a burden sometimes.
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there have been several articles exposing plastic recycling as green washing. unfortunately they never make it to mainstream media
i saw a chart somewhere showing less than 1% of plastic in use today is recycled but I can't find it now
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Right now it looks like paper and metal recycling is still good as far as I can read in two minutes. If someone has a correction let me know.
Correct. Paper (PS: or at least brown cardboard), glass and alu will always be great candidates for recycling.
Aluminum is the poster child for recycling, really. It takes more energy to extract it from the ore than it is to recycle it.
Former aluminum process engineer: This^
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I wonder how much the oil industry subsidies are responsible for making recycled plastic more expensive than the new one...
How to get politicians to change views:
Plastic causes ed and shrinkage
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The good news is that global warming (I prefer to call it Anthropogenic Runaway Global Heating because of the acronym) is going to completely fuck us all anyway, to the extent that plastic in the environment isn't going to matter by comparison. At least oil turned into plastic and buried isn't oil turned into CO2.
The two problems have a decent amount of overlap though. For example, I recently learned that car tyres are a huge contributor to microplastic pollution. This means that improving public transport infrastructure will reduce CO2 emissions and microplastic pollution.
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